Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [89]
For a while he lingered in Hamburg, restless and lovesick. He felt a stranger in his family, exasperated at the incessant chatter and bickering. To Clara he complained, “How little peace I am given here … if I ever have free time I have to have four at a time in one room, with continual running in and out.… Until now I was writing while five people had a lively conversation about my new coat.”14 He had been spending enough time out drinking to alarm her, so reassured her like a child: “Since you have gone I have not been in a single pub, so you can set your mind to rest on that score.”15 He wanted to be good for his Clara.
His passion was getting harder for her to receive in a motherly or sisterly way, but she offered no more than token resistance. She needed love as much as Johannes did; she did not have the will to push him away. Yet they could say little. On both sides there were pressures of love and need that could not be resolved because they could not be spoken, not yet.
Then Johannes pushed at the edge of the permissible again, writing her a letter that veiled his feelings thinly behind a screen of banter and fairy tale. After several rambling pages he burst out, “I have written you a dreadful letter. I can see that. So I shall write you a second one from out of the Thousand and One Nights. It describes my condition exactly although its writer was a prince and I am a composer.” There follows the story of Prince Camaralzaman and Princess Badoura. He ends the letter ambiguously, as if he were still in the story, signing it CAMARALZAMAN EBN. BRAH. In fact, he is transparently speaking words from his own heart: “Would to God that I were allowed this day instead of writing this letter to you to repeat to you with my own lips that I am dying of love for you. Tears prevent me from saying more.”16
IN THE ASYLUM AT ENDENICH, Robert Schumann had been calm in the last weeks, playing piano and writing letters to family and friends. Though everyone tried to stay cautious about his prospects, he evidently had gained ground. There were no voices in his mind, no supernatural orchestras. At her husband’s request, Clara sent him one of the Laurens silverpoints of Johannes. Robert wrote its subject: “My dear wife has sent me your portrait, your familiar features, and I know its place in my room very well, very well—under the mirror. I continue to feel uplifted by your variations. I should like to hear many of them performed by you and Clara.… Clara wrote to me that on page fourteen the music recalls something. What is it?”17 He had forgotten his wife’s melody, that he used in his own Impromptus. In December the doctors told Clara that she could not hope to see her husband for some time still. Once again her heart fell.
She arrived back in Düsseldorf just before Christmas with Brahms and Joachim in tow. In her journal she confessed that by the end of her concert tour, “I had been simply longing for Johannes. To him alone can I utter all that is in my heart. Joachim, too, is a dear and faithful friend, but Johannes is even more to me.”18 During their decades-long friendship and musical collaboration, Clara and Joachim would never use du.
The day before Christmas Joachim traveled to Endenich, where he was allowed to see Schumann. It was the first time doctors had allowed a visitor in the ten months the sick man had lived there. Joachim returned to Düsseldorf with encouraging reports, and a letter for Johannes in which Schumann for the first time wrote du.19 On Christmas Day, the first Brahms had spent away from home, the friends permitted themselves hope. Marie Schumann accompanied Joachim in her father’s violin sonata; Elise performed a little play. Clara presented Johannes with the complete works of his favorite, Jean Paul.
Just after the holidays Clara began with Johannes’s help to sort through Robert’s letters, burning the ones that seemed too personal to leave to history. She noticed that Johannes’s eyes shone with pleasure as he watched names and intimate words curl up and vanish in the fire.20 He would preserve